This is an edited transcript of a conversation between Michael Linton and Daromir Rudnyckyj about Keith Hart’s multi-decade interest in community currency in general and the LETSystem (Local Exchange Trading Systems) in particular. The conversation addresses how Linton and Hart came to know one another, Hart’s interest in community currency, and Linton’s reflections on where they found common ground and where they did not.

A Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) is a network-based, mutual-credit exchange platform that allows participants to trade goods and services without using conventional money. A key difference between LETS money and conventional money is that LETS money is issued by members of the network themselves, rather than by the state (as is the case with legal tender) or by commercial institutions (as is the case with bank credit). Credits issued by network members are recorded in a central ledger, enabling members of the network to both make goods and services available for purchase and to receive value from each other. LETSystems are interest-free, autonomously governed, and transparent. Participants in the network can hold balances that are either positive or negative. These balances reflect ongoing participation in the network rather than accumulated wealth. Given that the goal of LETSystems is that they keep money and value circulating in discrete networks, they offer a powerful means for localized, grassroots economic growth that is often poorly addressed through top-down state interventions or even community development efforts using state or bank-issued currency.

Daromir Rudnyckyj (DR): Michael, thank you so much for agreeing to have this conversation. To start, I was wondering if you could tell me about how you first came into contact with Keith Hart and what prompted his interest in community currency in general and the LETSystem in particular?

Michael Linton (ML): Well, I think he’d already established his authority and precedence in the field with his work in Africa on informal economy. My first meeting with him was through an email. In the late 1980s I was getting a lot of very bad emails, most of which were nonsense, but here was somebody with credentials, with background, and with experience. He saw the conjunction between what I was discussing as an economic engine and a mathematical-type process, and what he knew from the street and had had seen people do.

DR: And what specifically did he get right about the LETSystem that others had missed?

ML: The relevance of non-conventional money. People doing things because they could and adopting whatever strategies [that] made that possible. In his case, people were much more spur of the moment and acted according to a logic of “I’ll do you a favor, you do me one later.” He had no concept at that time of how it could be formalized through tracking, which is what you get from keeping a record. He as interested in making these transactions seeable by creating a memory bank so the energy can be passed on. I think what he saw in the LETSystem was a way of giving form to these connections which was otherwise too apt to blow away in the memory.

DR: Was it the ability to formalize informal economic connections that you think attracted him to LETS?

ML: I’m going to guess at this because I would hesitate to put my words into Keith’s mouth. I was popularizing something which was a small, commercial barter. I said, “Why not [make it available to] everybody?” Keith had been coming at this from the level of the street. In the community people knew each other and knew the benefit of getting on with each other. I think his attraction to the LETSystem was that he saw it as a form of money that wasn’t controlled by a government and that appealed to him. I mean, Keith was always a sort of anarchist in that respect. He did not yield authority to any authority, as it were. The LETSystem just basically explored the capacity for people to do what he described people were doing [in Africa] but to do it in larger collections and with greater effectiveness.

DR: In one exchange I had with Keith, he memorably referred to you as the “John Maynard Keynes of community currency.” By this, I understood him to mean that you had done similar things for community currency as Keynes had done for monetary policy. From your perspective, what aspects of the LETSystem seemed to interest Keith the most?

ML: I think it was the workability, something you could do. You could do it like a time bank informally with marks on the wall and somebody keeping score through little bits of paper or something. Or you could run it through a quasi-checking organization, writing checks to each other and putting them in the box and getting somebody to account for the process. There was nothing unusual about what we were doing except that we’d formalized the process.

DR: And how would you characterize the specific problem that you were trying to solve and that Keith found of such interest?

ML: I think it was a lack of centralization that would probably define it. When I got started in this field, there were monetary models, but they always had somebody in the middle running it. In fact, a local advocate on Vancouver Island used to say that he wanted to control the pricing and the allocation and the credit limits and all this sort of thing. So, they were little bastions of hierarchy, organizational limits, and control. In contrast, I wanted to create something that people felt autonomously responsible for. You know, “I’m accountable for my time and my efforts and I keep my promises.”

DR: When did you first meet in person and what were the circumstances of your first in-person interaction with Keith?

ML: It was in 1993 or 1994 when I was passing through Manchester. Keith came in from Old Trafford. We met outside the railway station, had a cup of coffee, and talked for an hour or so. I was setting up a large-scale project, but he wasn’t that engaged in that. He didn’t want to get into the nuts and bolts, the operations, or the reason why this would be attractive to a local baker, a local brewer, or a local papermaker.

DR: Based on the archives of the Comox Valley LETSystem that we hold at the Counter Currency Laboratory, sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s, you and Keith began working on a book together. Could you talk a little bit about how that project came to be and what your vision was for the co-authored book?

ML: Oh, big and varied, and different in the end. He wanted to collaborate on a book that dealt with the origins and theory of the LETSystem. And I wanted to collaborate on a book or media project that did the same but also extended into current realities and practice. I wanted to create something that was immediate and transferable. Keith’s version of the book would have been a tremendous accelerator for that. But, in the end, we didn’t want to publish the same book.

DR: How did you understand Keith Hart’s interest in the relation between the LETSystem, money and informal economies?

ML: He was a downright radical. He wanted people to live fairly and benevolently and not go around screwing each other and having wars. I mean, he did not like that shit. He did not see the point in it and he saw how it came about. So, he was looking for ways of not letting that happen. He introduced me to C. L. R. James’s work and his [James’s] thinking about colonialism in the West Indies and later in northern England. James inspired Keith in thinking about making the economy better for more people.

DR: So, Keith thought that the LETSystem offered an opportunity for greater economic equality and social justice?

ML: Yes, it was common in this situation where people would say, “This is good for the poor, but don’t let the rich have it.” And I said, “No, you can’t not have this be generally available.” Some people wanted no businesses involved because [they thought] business is bad. They make profits and if they make a profit, they must be taking something from somebody. Well, there’s a bit of truth in that, but not much. Keith was very grounded; I’d call him a libertarian anarchist with Trotskyite sympathies. He was definitely left-wing, no doubt about that, and yet he didn’t despise wealth. In fact, he was a famous man in the betting shop. He bet on life and life paid well.

DR: Do you think there is a connection between the risk-taking character of someone who plays the horses, as Keith did, and someone who is interested in experimental economic forms such as the LETSystem?

ML: Well, there’s a connection between those things, but it’s only a connection shared by very few people. Keith was always reacting to society, revolting from it. He did not like what he saw and he saw that it could be better. Keith didn’t want anything wishy-washy or vague. And I think that’s where we found most conjunction was that he could see that I was talking with rigor about something that held together because you built it right. And if you didn’t build it right, the wings would fall off or the wheels wouldn’t go around. There was a comfortable respect between us for that. We saw the same things as required. If this doesn’t work, there’s no point. Now, he did see it coming from the people. And he did resent the idea that it was going to be also applicable to Unilever and Shell and ICI and the City of London. He didn’t think that was fair. Fair? I don’t know what that’s about. But you see, if you’ve grown up as a social change advocate, if you’re a politician from the grassroots up, as Keith was, he was an ardent politician in that sense. He was not running for office, but he did not like the way the game was played. So he liked something that put power in the right place, but he didn’t like that the power was also going to be available to anybody.

DR: Michael, I think we’re getting close to reaching the end of our time, but I wanted to thank you for sharing your recollections of the work that you did with Keith Hart and letting us know about his interests in the LETSystem.

ML: Well, I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to do that. I mean, this has been a very entertaining recovery of an incomplete memory set.

Michael Linton is the founder of Landsman Community Services and designer of the original Comox Valley LETSystem, which became the prototype for dozens of LETSystems that have operated in communities in Canada, the UK, Australia, the United States, Japan, Ecuador, the Netherlands, France, and South Africa, among other places.

Daromir Rudnyckyj is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory and co-principal investigator of the Futures of Money Project.